In this novel the multiverse is real (are real?) and the protagonist (and others) can visit these other realities which include other versions of himself. One would expect a novel based on quantum entanglement to get confusing and this one did. (There were moments in the story that reminded me of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series.) If you’ve ever pondered what you life would have been like if you had taken that other fork in the road, you might enjoy this novel. I found it well written but disturbing. I was eager to get to the end. (Amazon)
Category Archives: Books
William Gibson interview
William Gibson fans will want to read this short interview by Business Insider. Mr. Gibson talks about ‘The Peripheral,’ the power of Twitter, and his next book set in today’s Silicon Valley.
“I am able to wake up, open Twitter, and sort of glance across the psychic state of the planet.”
What does a writer do when the world gets weirder faster than you can write about it?
“…he world is already that much weirder than it was when I started writing the book. You know the level of freakiness we have experienced in 2016 is so far off the charts, I am having to go back and crank up the weirdness in parts of the book I have already written.”
And it’s only August. Worried about the Middle East? Don’t be.
“And then I see NASA’s climate projection for the Middle East in 2050 or so, when they say none of it will be livable by human beings who don’t have space suits.”
Questions an AI might ask
“She wanted to know whether a person could die by spontaneous combustion. The odds against a letter slipped under the door slipping under the carpet as well. Ishmael’s real name. Who this “Reader” was, and why he rated knowing who married whom. Whether single men with fortunes really needed wives. What home would be without Plumtree’s Potted Meats. How long it would take to compile a key to all mythologies. What the son of a fish looked like. Where Uncle Toby was wounded. Why anyone wanted to imagine unquiet slumbers for sleepers in quiet earth. Whether Conrad was a racist. Why Huck Finn was taken out of libraries. Which end of an egg to break. Why people read. Why they stopped reading. What it meant to be “only a novel.” What use half a locket was to anyone. Why it would be mistake not to live all you can.”
Galatea 2.2
“After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2—Richard Powers—returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing.” — Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
I began to see the web as just the latest term in an ancient polynomial expansion. Each nick on the timeline spit out some fitful precursor. Everyone who ever lived had lived at a moment of equal astonishment. Continue reading
Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All
God damn, this was a depressing read. But it’s a good example of something I don’t have a good name for. Sort of a you-know-the-truth-when-you-hear-it. It’s a combination of details and phrasing, maybe? Are humans wired to know when someone’s lying? The guy that wrote The Art of the Deal fucked up and knows it.
“But I knew I was selling out. Literally, the term was invented to describe what I did.” Soon Spy was calling him “former journalist Tony Schwartz.”
That is a heavy weight to carry and it might get a lot heavier.
During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.
I’ll confess this is a bias of mine. I always feel a little superior to people to don’t read books. I wonder how many books (and screenplays) are in the works about Trump. I wonder if he knows the difference between famous and infamous. Or cares.